Slashdot Mirror
AMD's New 12nm Ryzen Laptop Chips Look To Put the Pressure on Intel (theverge.com)
AMD has been pushing its Ryzen lineup of processors for a few years now, with the company looking to put pressure on Intel's seemingly unbeatable hold on the chip landscape. From a report: At CES 2019, AMD unveiled its second generation of Ryzen laptop chips, which look to jump ahead of Intel's 14nm roadblock to offer some of the first 12nm processors on the market. To that end, AMD is launching a new lineup of Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, and Ryzen 7 chips across both the 15W U-series and 35W H-series lineups, almost all of which are built off of the company's new 12nm Zen+ architecture. For the more powerful H-series, there are a pair of new chips: the Ryzen 7 3750H, offering four cores / eight threads, a base clock speed of 2.3 GHz (which can boost to 4.0 GHz), and the Ryzen 5 3550H, also a four core / eight thread processor, but with a 2.1 GHz base speed (which can boost to 3.7 GHz), and only eight GPU cores to the Ryzen 7 3750H's ten. Further reading: AMD Gets Serious About Chromebooks at CES 2019.
Back in the early 2000's AMD had a clear and convincing lead in both absolute performance and price-performance for 2.5-3 years. Intel successfully kept them out of mass-market OEM products and cash-starved AMD was not able to keep up with Intel's research budget-- eventually paying a $1.25B settlement to AMD but this was not sufficient to make AMD whole.
Following that, we've had an extended period of stagnation on Intel's side until this point where AMD is again neck and neck with them.
The processor market is a whole lot better for everyone when this competition exists.